Sunday, February 13, 2005

A Laywoman's Lectionary: Scarcity and Abundance - For the First Sunday in Lent (2/13/05)

Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. He fasted forty days and forty nights, and afterwards he was famished. The tempter came and said to him, "If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread." But he answered, "It is written, 'One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.'"

Then the devil took him to the holy city and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, "If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down; for it is written, 'He will command his angels concerning you,' and 'On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.'" Jesus said to him, "Again it is written, 'Do not put the Lord your God to the test.'"

Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor; and he said to him, "All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me." Jesus said to him, "Away with you, Satan! for it is written, 'Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.'" Then the devil left him, and suddenly angels came and waited on him. (Matthew 4:1-11) [NRSV]

Many of us have issues with food. Sometimes such difficult ones that we think that forty days without would be easier than going on Weight Watchers. People who struggle with eating disorders are sometimes heard to wish that their problem was instead alcohol, or cigarette smoking -- it seems that it would be easier to eliminate something completely from our lives than to have to monitor it judiciously. But the real truth is that we know that 40 days without food would be close to impossible and, definitely, impossibly dangerous. We know that so well that, unless we are really ill, we don't even entertain the idea. It's more likely that we'll respond as I did the other day, when entering a newly renovated bakery. The sign above the door says, "Man CAN live on bread alone!" But woman, I thought, needs a Margarita, too.

So why doesn't a hungry Jesus just turn those stones to bread?

How about testing God to care for us? How many bargains have you made with God? I started when I was a little girl, an incipient atheist in the making. "God, " I would say as I lay in bed at night, "prove yourself. Just move that table over there. Just a couple of inches. I need a sign!" As I got older and moved into the wretchedness of what passed for adolescence in my life, I gave up hope that there would ever be a sign. I threw myself repeatedly into the way of danger without ever a thought that there was anyone to protect me.

But Jesus had every reason to be confident. Why didn't he grab that opportunity to show off the power of God?

And finally, the big one. The whole world. Anything you want. I spend a lot of time thinking about things I want. A redecorated downstairs. Functional plumbing in the spare bathroom. A bigger yard. A hot tub. A entirely different yard for the hot tub -- one several hundred miles away where it's sunny ALL WINTER. My stepmother's recovery. My children's guaranteed health and safety. The Mastercard bill paid off. No more emotional trauma. A month in Italy and one in France. An organized basement. A full night's sleep.

So why didn't Jesus want all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor?

I've been taking a class on the 13th-14th century German mystic Meister Eckhart and last night some of our discussion revolved around issues of scarcity and abundance. What do we think we need? What do we cling to? Why?

The answer to the "Why?" seems to be a simply and yet terribly complex one: fear. We fear scarcity. We fear, ultimately, scarcity of love, of God's love. In a passage from a book called Beauty by an author new to me, John O'Donohue, our instructor read (and I have to paraphrase here): Unless we say "Yes" to God's love, we operate out of a sense of scarcity and begin to back off and protect ourselves.

What we do, it seems to me, is look for every opportunity to turn stones to bread, to prove that we are safe, and to take over the world -- as least as much of it as we personally think we need.

"Sometimes," says O'Donohue, " the urgency of our hunger blinds us to the fact that we're already at the feast."

That's what Jesus knew -- that he was already there. Hungry and tired and lonely and no doubt in need of a bath, he knew that he was in the midst of the abundance of his father's love. The things to which one would expect a king to be attached -- rich food, a show of power, command over all that lay before him -- were of no significance to him. They were nothing but signs of scarcity, of our eagerness to fill our lives with emptiness and overlook the abundance of the present moment.

It would be a good thing if, for Lent, I could focus on the abundance of the present moment. The honest truth, though, is that it's a clear night out there, with Orion and an exact half-moon starkly etched into the sky, and I wish there were a hot tub on the back porch.

Why Gannet? Why Search the Sea?

Gannets are enormous and sleek creamy-white seabirds, with black wingtips, yellow heads and necks, and startlingly outlined eyes. They nest on the rocky cliffs of the European and North American coasts of the North Atlantic and, once grown, spend their days sailing across the ocean. The acrobatics by which they make their living ~ steep climbs into the air and speedy plunges straight into the sea ~ are rivaled only by those of pelicans.
What better metaphor for a sweeping search of one's life choices and opportunities than a gannet extended above the waves, a regal and yet restless surveyor of the vast ocean surface? The gannet reminds us that life is an adventure in both beauty and profound unease, and that the sea itself is limitless in its textures and possibilities.